How do you make a film about conjoined twins who play in a rock band without turning it into freak show? Donald Clarke meets the writer and twin stars of Brothers of the Head
I am packing up my accoutrements after a satisfactory interview with Tony Grisoni, screenwriter of Brothers of the Head, and Harry and Luke Treadaway, the stars of that singular English diversion, when the author makes a puzzling comment.
"What delights me most is that Roberta Howe herself likes it," he says blithely, with neither a wink nor a nudge.
Sorry? What? "The sister of the real twins. She has said it makes her feel they were here now. That's important."
This is somewhat akin to having Martin Scorsese tell you that Doris Bickle just loved the representation of her brother in Taxi Driver. What is Grisoni talking about?
Let us backtrack. Brothers of the Head tells the (fictional) story of conjoined twins who become stars of the messy, noisy pub-rock scene that offered refugees fleeing Emerson, Lake and Palmer some solace in the years preceding the birth of punk. Among the first things Grisoni tells me is that Brian Aldiss, the great British science fiction writer, from whose novel the script is adapted, quite literally dreamed up the idea while dozing in his holiday home three decades ago.
"He had had this big row with this wife," Grisoni explains. "And he was such a pig nobody would sit next to him on the drive home. Then he suddenly remembered this terrible dream and it had all this blood and sex in it. They asked him about it and at first he didn't want to tell them, but he eventually gave in. And that story was Brothers of the Head."
The bleak yarn recounts how Tom and Barry Howe are sold to a savagely cynical music promoter by their thoughtless father and, under the name Bang Bang, end up devising a snarling new class of rock music that helps them achieve the status of cult heroes.
"The story came from a very pure place. This man had a dream," Grisoni continues. "He wrote the book in 1977 and I first met him about 1979 or 1980. And I told him I'd really like to make a film of this. So, his agents and all these people were saying: 'We have to talk about money'. But Brian was adamant. 'Tony must have it for free'."
Grisoni toyed with the concept for a year, but failed to raise any financing. More than two decades later, the writer encountered Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, two American documentary film-makers, on the set of Terry Gilliam's famously doomed production of The Man who Killed Don Quixote.
Fulton and Pepe, who had made a revealing film on Twelve Monkeys, an earlier Gilliam picture, went on to document the collapse of the Quixote fiasco in the now-classic Lost in La Mancha.
When the Americans mentioned to Grisoni that they were keen to embark on an original project, Brothers of the Head jumped back into the writer's mind. Allowing the directors the opportunity to take just baby steps away from their previous realm of expertise, Grisoni wrote the script as a mock-documentary featuring numerous gaps within which the cast could improvise.
Notwithstanding the contribution of two American directors, Brothers of the Head emerges as a classically grim exercise in English outsider art. Tom and Barry will, in their proud embrace of physical difference, remind many of the late Ian Dury, a polio survivor, whose song Spasticus Autisticus pushed the same incendiary buttons as Bang Bang's awkward numbers.
Brian Aldiss's books have always been welcome on the shelves of Camden squats and Glastonbury collectives. Grisoni, by working repeatedly with Terry Gilliam, proud alumnus of Monty Python, has earned his place in this company. All this noted, it should come as no surprise to hear that Ken Russell, the patron saint of English madness, turns up in Brothers of the Head as himself. The famously rubicund director of The Devils and Tommy is depicted as having attempted an earlier dramatic film based on the Bang Bang story.
"I had drawn up a shortlist of British directors for that spot," Grisoni says. "But really only Ken would have done. I worked for him as a runner many years back and I think I did a very bad job. He did sort of hijack us from time to time. It didn't take him long to start trying to direct the picture. 'Don't do it like that. Do it like this.'"
The participation of Saint Kenneth must have been welcome. But no such imprimatur would have rescued Brothers of the Head if the film-makers had failed to come up with a satisfactory duo of actors to place at the picture's sordid centre.
HARRY AND LUKE Treadaway, identical twins, grafted, perhaps, from one of Jonathan Rhys Meyers's less stringy stalks, were, then, 19-year-old students at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Together they whip up a formidable storm of angst and fury. Shot on a modest budget, the picture employs no elaborate prosthetics to simulate the physical conjunction between the twins.
"Like a lot of things in the film, it involved a real learning curve," Harry says. "We began with a rock climber's harness attaching us together, but that was hard work. Then we tried two wetsuits stuck together and that was good, because we could swim in that. All the time we were giving feedback, but it was a hard business. It was very important to us that we didn't give a rough approximation of the performance. Because this is a real condition and we wanted to show respect."
Luke nods cautiously. "Even though we were so physically close together I was only ever concerned with my own character," he says. "That was always helped by the way Keith and Lou directed it. We would never talk too much about the scene in general. They would ask us individually about the ebb and flow of our own character's life and what they thought about things. That sort of carefully streamlined direction gave the film its character."
So, were there . . . How shall I put this? "Lavatory difficulties? Damn right. But all that became second nature after a while."
THE FILM, A murky, brown beast, permits any number of parallels between the Howe brothers' performances and the freak shows of an earlier era. Everyone involved with Brothers of the Head seems like a decent, responsible sort, but Grisoni and the Treadaway brothers must have surely had some concerns about the appropriateness of basing such an entertainment around the adventures of conjoined twins. Was there not a danger that the film itself might take on the quality of a freak show?
"I didn't think too hard about what other peoples' reactions were going to be to it," Grisoni says. "But, of course, we are not stupid. We are aware how conjoined twins can often be seen as exotic or freakish. The tale deals with that, I think. There is an impresario who wants to turn them into a novelty act and that touches on that. A lot of those rock managers did come from a world of almost Dickensian music hall. Their idea of what a show was emerged from that. But the film sees Barry and Tom embracing the idea of being freaks - 'We are bigger freaks than you have ever seen and proud'."
This was very much the attitude that drove the English incarnation of punk. The Sex Pistols' original act incorporated an unashamed declaration of the band's natural difference, defiant ugliness and stubborn lack of talent (never mind that the difference was cultured, they were scruffily sexy and, Sid Vicious aside, could play better than they pretended). An unspoken subtext to Brothers of the Head is that Bang Bang invented punk.
"Brian will tell you he is not a great punk aficionado," Grisoni says. "But you could not but be aware of those things at the time. The film is set in the mid-1970s when the era of the big beasts - Led Zeppelin and so forth - is coming to an end. And the band's attitude is clearly punk. But we were careful. The word "punk" is never used, just as the word "mafia" was never used in The Godfather." All of which helps clarify how carefully imagined the world of Brothers of the Head is. You could almost believe it to be real.
This is where we came in. Grisoni, who is surely acting mischievously, seems to have timed his comment about Roberta Howe - such a character does appear in the picture - so that I would not have time to ask him to further explain himself.
Subsequent researches reveal no evidence of any factual basis to Brothers of the Head. But somehow the remark still nags away at me. This, I imagine, was his intention all along.
• Brothers of the Head is on limited release